Thursday, 23 February 2012

The Descendants (2011)

Alexander
Payne’s reputation as a thornily honest and satirically acute, yet
essentially humanist director has always been based in his capacity to feed
back to his audience carefully cultivated truisms. Swaggering egotists often
succeed better than uncertain neurotics and hapless hypocrites; sometimes the
older and wiser aren’t really wiser or even nice; people of the left and right
often disagree and are sometimes all silly, and so forth. Such truisms are
leavened by faux-profound moments of emotional insight, an unmistakeable odour
of literary pretension, and an affectation of artistic purpose that can be casually
tossed aside for the sake of any old bit of comic incongruity that might goose
the slackness of his narratives, like the ludicrous naked man that derailed any
pretence of Sideways (2005) to seriousness.
The Descendants, his latest, adapted
from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, sports a hero, Mike King (George Clooney),
who is largely more functional and empathetic than some of his predecessors in
the Payne canon. Given that the stunted ethical fibre of the heroes of Election (1999) and Sideways was just about the only interesting aspects of those
films, however, Payne finds himself like a young learner swimmer, furiously dog
paddling just to keep his head above water in a film that’s overlong and
underdeveloped. Mike is often heard in declarative voiceover throughout the
film, and early on he delivers a tirade against propositions that living in a
“paradise” like the Hawaiian island insulates you from the petty and the
painful, but the film quickly swaps such palate-cleansing cynicism to pad itself
out with seemingly endless scene-setting brochure shots of the tale’s Hawaiian
setting, crowded with pretty local music. The tale gives Clooney another shot at
an Oscar through playing another menopausal male befuddled by rapid shifts in
his world’s organising principles.

Mike
is the descendant, of course, of a union between an American missionary and an
Hawaiian princess, back in the colonising days (shades of James Michener’s Hawaii), and one who’s been left as the
sole legal trustee of a huge tract of undeveloped land, a precious commodity on
the already well-exploited islands. Mike is a lawyer, having lived as if he’s
not sitting on top of an inheritance that could make him and his kin stinking
rich, as that was his choice to keep his family grounded, following his
father’s credo. But it’s a choice that seems be reaping him endless troubles of
late. New laws are poised to take the land away, and his extended clan (all known as Cousin This That and Whatever), many of
whom are not so well off, and
they’re eager for a sale, so Mike agrees to abide by a majority family decision about who to and for how much they will sell.
Mike’s wife Elizabeth (Grace A. Cruz) is in a degenerative coma after a boating
accident: she is glimpsed at the film’s very outset wearing a look of carefree
joy as she rides the waves off the Oahu coast, presumably just prior to the
disaster. Subsequently she’s defined and redefined as the kind of lady who can
be described as a free spirit or a feckless cow, depending on one’s viewpoint,
but the film isn’t really interested in studying this schism. The film
concentrates rather on Mike’s attempts to first connect with his sullen,
alienating teenage daughters, Alex (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara
Miller), and then track down his wife’s lover, who proves to be a smug-ugly
realtor named Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard).

There
are many engaging and potentially enriching elements in The Descendants, including the practically Dostoyevskian proximity
of mortal crisis and colossal fiscal transaction, in a narrative that offers plentiful opportunities for depicting an hysterical devolution in the modern American family psyche. Which makes its
choice to play out along the most obvious and conservative lines all the more
frustrating: The Descendants is
basically another one of those pseudo-indie movies where family come together
to laugh and cry and engage in assorted oddballery in acting out their various
catharses. The subplot of the land sale is really just window dressing,
designed to give Mike an opportunity to demonstrate his rectitude by suddenly
deciding not to sign on the dotted line in spite of his hectoring Cousin Hugh
(Beau Bridges), and give the tale, which would otherwise be defined as strictly
domestic angst, a flavour of cultural import. One aspect that makes The Descendants a slight stand-out from
a welter of familial crisis dramedies is that the dying, contentious figure is a
mother rather than a father: “You think women can’t do anything wrong?” Mike
asks Elizabeth’s grating gal pal Kai (Mary Birdsong) when he confronts her
shortly after learning about his wife’s affair. Kai doesn’t want to talk about
the affair with Mike when Elizabeth isn’t around to defend herself, and whilst
the film sides with Mike to an extent in snorting at this kind of tendentious
hypocrisy, the audience is left to circle around an enigmatic Elizabeth who is
anything but enigmatic to those who know her, so that whilst the characters
wrestle with their feelings towards a complex and irreducible persona, there’s
no access for the audience. Rather, reactions are all guided by Mike and Alex
in particular. Alex is filled with rage at her mother, trailing a recent
history of bad behaviour, and having learnt about the affair long before Mike.

At
the outset, before Elizabeth’s doctors confirm her state is irrecoverable,
Mike, who describes himself as hitherto the “back-up parent”, is shepherding
Scottie, who raises the ire of a schoolmate’s mother (Karen Kuioka Hironaga)
after aiming a few mean comments her daughter’s way, and Mike takes Elizabeth
to make a ritual apology, a sequence skewering both Mike’s general passivity
and one of Payne’s favourite targets, the passive-aggressive tone of
contemporary suburban “tolerance”. Scottie’s seemingly nascent pre-adolescent
darkness is however elided in making her a stock repository for precocious kid
humour, as in her cheery approval of swear words. Woodley’s Alex is a little more
substantial: she seems initially to be a variation on all those spuriously
angry/contemptuous teen girls that were a dime a dozen in late ‘90s movies and
TV shows. But this is leavened a little by Woodley’s cunning in loaning her an
edge of perversity, as she becomes something like Mike’s familiar, hanging over
his shoulder and egging him on in his search for Elizabeth’s lover, and
insisting on getting in on the act herself. Father and daughter finally bond
effectively as they work up a plan for Alex to distract Speer’s oblivious wife
Julie (Judy Greer) so Mike can confront his nemesis, Speer, who proves to be
hardly nefarious, but also clearly possesses all the moral fibre of an egg
noodle. Lurking not far beneath the surface of the tale is an interesting
dilemma of modern social function: Mike, having attempted to resist letting
himself and his family be crucified by a sense of entitlement and sloth, is
instead the constant target of resentment because of this, especially from
Elizabeth’s crusty, faintly malignant father Scott (Robert Forster), for
failing to deliver the leisured gadabout lifestyle he could have, choosing
instead to subject his family to the crime of living within means and
necessitating his absence in business.

The Descendants is most successful when portraying the
characters’ emotional quagmires and their ways of feeling through them, as when
Mike tries to rein in Alex’s tirades at her prone mother as he feels it’s the
right thing to do, even though he’s doing the same thing when no-one’s around;
when, furious and out to strip down Kai’s wilful resistance to his righteous
anger, Mike pushes too far without knowing it in informing her that she’s been
plastering make-up on what is now practically a corpse, not her friend; and
when Mike and Scottie, fetching Alex from the private school on Hawaii her
mother exiled her too, find her drunk and acting up, spouting “Fuck Mom!” in
her addled and defensive state. The
Descendants is least successful when it’s trying to milk the audience’s
emotions in set-piece moments, like Alex first learning her mother’s going to
die, submerging herself in the pool for a big theatrical moment of
pseudo-poetic emoting, Mike’s teary deathbed farewell to Elizabeth, and
Scottie’s being told what’s going to happen to her mother via touchy-feely
gee-tar scored montage. Even the film’s last scene is so precious in its posed,
“casual” catharsis depicting Mike, Alex, and Scottie curling up in front of the
television together, that the impact is lost. Payne proves determined to hew to
a discursive narrative holding pattern that results in a film at least twenty
minutes longer than it should be. Unfortunately, too, the film breaks up the
emotional intensity whenever it feels like it, trucking in deadpan humour like
a basketball coach calling time outs to give the tale an illusory quality of
tragicomic roundedness.

But
much of this humour, as usual in Payne, is contrived, especially in making Sid
(Nick Krause), the boy Alex chooses for some reason to be her constant
companion and buffer zone between herself and the world, a gormless surfer
dude. He's present merely and specifically to invest certain scenes with a inapt
sensibility, inane enough to laugh at Scott’s wife’s (Barbara L. Southern)
dementia and earning a sock in the mouth from Scott, and to present Mike with
another frustratingly indecipherable emblem of youth. He’s later partly
redeemed as simply a good-natured, preternaturally chilled-out kid, himself
recently having lost a parent, but that’s a touch that still doesn’t rescue him
from being a contrived screenwriting gimmick. Likewise a scene late in the film
when Julie, having learnt of her husband’s affair with Elizabeth, comes to
deliver a gauche and hapless deathbed pardon that Mike has to embarrassedly cut
short. An earlier moment where Mike kisses Julie on the mouth directly after
confronting her husband, is far more elusive and amusing in blending on almost
subliminal levels both a conscious vengeful intent mixed with an effervescent
emotional clasping at straws that suggests just how unmoored Mike’s feelings
are. Yet there remains a curious inspecificity to Mike King as the centre of the drama; his failings are declared rather than portrayed.

More
moments like that kiss that could have given The
Descendants the eccentric volatility that would have made it
fundamentally richer and more affecting, but instead it’s caught in a tone of ambling
melancholia. A scene close to the end, where the weepy family cast Elizabeth’s
ashes into the sea, reminded me precisely of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010), an undoubtedly more
self-conscious work that nonetheless also makes far deeper incisions into not
only a sense of personal eddying within grief, but in connecting it to a larger
sense of worldly crisis. The acting, unsurprisingly, buoys the film, from
relative neophyte Woodley to the succession of undervalued elder statesmen like
Forster, Bridges, and Michael Ontkean, and the unexpectedly but effectively
cast Lillard. Clooney is very good for his part, although the promise of The American (2010) to offer him a Once Upon A Time In The West-style
trash-job on his spell of playing protagonists with an aura of hangdog
emotional bewilderment and essential decency under layers of compromise, has
been exposed as false. Instead he and the film are stuck hopelessly in the
middle of the road, right in the path of Oscars.

13 comments:

Clooney and everybody else included is great but it’s really Payne who shines as the writer bringing out some funny humor but not without forgetting about the real rich moments of human drama. Good review, as usual. A good film but not as great as I was expecting.

"Speer, who proves to be hardly nefarious, but also clearly possesses all the moral fibre of an egg noddle."

That bit made me laugh out loud. I do like Payne's films, esp. SIDEWAYS, which I felt was a nice throwback to Bob Rafelson's films from the '70s. I will admit to being curious about this new one. I've read reviews both pro and con but yours is definitely one of the most eloquent. It certainly has piqued my curiosity even more to check this one out.

JD, it's interesting that you bring up Rafelson. I can never stop thinking about how snarky and phony Payne's films are compared to Rafelson's best works, and others by the best American New Wave filmmakers who are generally either forgotten or patronised by people who think Payne's the greatest thing since sliced bread. I like aspects of Election and Sideways very much, but Payne constantly violates their texture so he can pull off some silly joke or shallow piece of misanthropy. Like those films, The Descendants is hardly a bad movie, but I find Payne's gifts absurdly over-hyped.

I think possibly I liked it slightly more than you, didn't dislike it, didn't like it that much, were it not for all of the critical attention I wouldn't have given it a second thought. Overall I didn't find either of the two main threads in the movie (the land, the dying wife/alienation from kids) terribly compelling. I think you nailed the part I perhaps liked least - the goofball Sid, he just seemed to be there to pop up for comic relief every now and then, I kept wondering why Clooney would even tolerate having him along for some delicate family moments.

I am starting to get the idea that Clooney has learned how to act, I liked him in The American and Fantastic Mr. Fox (yes, it's animated, but I still thought he was really good, as much as you can determine that by just voice), and again in this one.

I read an interview with Payne where he said that he considers most of his films comedies which is a pretty telling comment and what ultimately separates them from a filmmaker like Rafelson. I don't think Rafelson ever considered any of his '70s output to be comedies (well, maybe HEAD) and really only used comedy to a limited degree in his films and often uncomfortably. In comparison, Payne is a much more lightweight filmmaker but I still like his stuff.

Patrick: well, all in all it sounds like we had the same experience, even if my report on it is more aggressive. I've actually been a fan of Clooney's for a long time, it's simply that his recent run of "serious" roles has often been so tiresome. But I agree his vocal performance in Fantastic Mr Fox is excellent. I still think he's most naturally a comedic actor. And JD, I do hear you, but the genre definition isn't so really important, I don't think: even an out and out comedy from the '70s like Slap-Shot feels infinitely more authentic to me than Payne's films.

"Ambling melancholia" is the perfect description. The entire movie lands hard in a rut early on and never spins out of it. I was captivated initially by the uniqueness of place, but by the end I was frustrated by this abandonment of any moral thrust: it is revealed that Speer, the very man who'd cuckolded Matt, is to receive a giant wad of cash when/if Matt signs over the land, turning Matt's dilemma away from grandiose save-the-land and/or make-the-family-rich concerns to a more personal why-would-I-willingly-give-anything-to-this-creep concerns. And then Payne promptly and unreflectedly tosses all this under the plot bus with the whip of Matt's pen, with no further comment on the Speer character. (Forgive if I missed or misinterpreted something, it's been awhile since I saw it -- but it sure bugged me in the viewing.)

Rob: in fairness to the film, it does try to demonstrate how the issues are only linked in Matt's head, as Speer derides the notion he was sleeping with Elizabeth to advantage himself in the deal. The scenes depicting Mike and family exploring the land and realising how valuable both the personal and cultural value of such unspoilt territory is, compared to the proposed development which was a good modern environmentally conscious, anti-big capital people are supposed to automatically deride and abhor, are supposed to explicate Mike's later decision. But the drama is all still based in the same popular but trite and cliched idea that realtor/developer = slimy douchebag just as pristine unspoilt land < development. Speer's violation of Mike's patriarchal domain is equated with the impending rape of the land by the forces the smarmy and shallow Speer represents.

I see that correlation, the one between his decision and the evil that Speer represents -- well said. But I sure do wish they'd have at least followed up on the comeuppance end of the bargain (re: Speer's link to Elizabeth) and given us something to look at besides a crystal blue lagoon and a bowl of ice cream.

I liked the film, highly regarded the performances, much of the writing, and the smart use of the Hawaiian locales. The sub-plot about the island real estate was somewhat of a distraction, but when the film stayed the course it was affecting. As always you peel away the gauze here most persuasively.